


you told me i was like the Dead Sea

by prettydizzeed



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Tattoos, brief mention of past suicide ideation, past abusive relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 21:23:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13198827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: “I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.”Whiskey on the rocks, in four parts.





	you told me i was like the Dead Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arekiras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arekiras/gifts).



> happy holidays Ira you are the Best & I love you so much, sorry this fic is really sad but I hope you like it anyway <3
> 
> title and the italicized parts at the beginning of III and IV are from "Dead Sea" by the Lumineers  
> other quotes are from Shadowhunters episodes (I'm too lazy to find the specifics)

**_“I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.”_ **

_I. “You’re immortal, but she killed you.”_

Catarina speaks first. “Okay, there are six warlocks in one room, who died?”

“Magnus's heart,” Ragnor drawls, leaning back in his armchair.

Catarina’s exhale sounds suspiciously similar to _finally_ , but she strides over to the couch and gives Magnus a long hug, so he ignores it.

“What do you want to drink?” Dot asks.

“Whiskey on the rocks,” Ragnor answers for him.

“You're so predictable,” Catarina says, teasing. “Feels like that's been your go-to for a millenia.”

He shrugs. “What can I say, it's a classic.” It's reliable. It burns like the fire brimming beneath his hands. _And does just as much damage_ , Catarina’s been saying for centuries.

The ice clinks and his rings echo it as he settles his hand upon the armrest. He presses the glass against his palms until it’s no longer cold, and wonders if his rings would warp if he buried them in the ice bucket. His pulse is just slightly too close to the surface, and he has a vague urge to glamour his entire skin until it looks like something she never touched.

Instead, he redecorates.

Elliot almost falls off Ragnor’s lap as the armchair shifts beneath them, stretches into a loveseat—no, then a bergère—then a chaise lounge—

Elliot moves to sit on the floor, muttering about being dizzy, and leans back to press his head against Ragnor’s thigh when the rug flashes through a dozen patterns beneath him, closing his eyes in exasperation.

“Is he always like this?” Elliot grumbles, though not unkindly. His words are half-muffled by Ragnor’s slacks.

“Not always. Sometimes we actually have to go shopping.”

Magnus swaps the coffee table for a kotatsu just as Elliot moves to set his glass down, and Ragnor laughs at the resulting twist of his lips.

“I would normally kiss him now,” Ragnor announces. “I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I am making for you.”

Catarina rolls her eyes. “As if we didn’t already know that you have no self-control to speak of and can’t keep your hands off him for a two-hour gathering.”

“Not hands,” Ragnor says, “mouth,” and Elliot blushes.

“So you’re leaving after two hours?” Magnus asks, and he knows he keeps his tone conversational, but Catarina reaches out and squeezes his hand anyway.

“I doubt you’ll trust me to portal home by then,” she says, and raises her glass with a smile.

When Magnus finally settles on a color for the largest couch, Elias sits beside him. “I’ve had about all I can handle of them,” he says, nodding at where Elliot is perched on the arm of Ragnor’s chair. “Sickening.” He’s smiling.

“I, for one, have always found young love adorable,” Dot says, perching on the armrest beside Magnus, her voice pitched so Ragnor can easily overhear.

“Fuck you, I’m at least two centuries older than you!” he huffs, and she laughs.

“And yet she’s more powerful,” Magnus says, raising an eyebrow. His lips are barely tilted up at the corners, but it’s something. Catarina exhales; it’s not quite a sigh of relief, but her back is not as stiff as it was when she got here.

“Blasphemy!” Ragnor exclaims, waving his drink, “Slander!” Some wine sloshes onto the new carpet, and Catarina rolls her eyes as she cleans it with a flick of her fingers.

“I swear, we can’t take you anywhere.”

Ragnor starts to protest, but Dot laughs and says, “Have you forgotten Cairo already?” and Ragnor trails off with a grumble. He isn’t blushing—he never blushes—but his skin is slightly less pale than normal. Elliot snorts.

“That entire trip was a bad idea,” Elias says, hiding his smirk behind his glass.

“Oh, come now,” Magnus says, nudging him, “You only turn 250 once.”

“And I thought I would never make it to 90,” Elias shoots back.

Magnus knows it’s a joke about the drugs (and probably also the tiger), but he still stiffens. Dot drapes her arm around his shoulders. “I'm still surprised he managed to portal back without puking,” she stage whispers, and Magnus gives her a small smile in thanks. Elias protests that he can hold his drink as well as any of them, and Elliot reminds him about Amsterdam, and Magnus lets their bickering push the memory of red fingernails against his wrist to the furthest edge of his mind.

He switches the curtains out during a lull in the conversation. The whole room is in cool colors now, turquoise and mint green and amethyst, and his pulse settles down between his bones. Catarina is gazing at him knowingly, but then again, when isn’t she?

He refills Elias’s glass with a quick motion of his hand. “Thought I might be getting cut off,” Elias says.

“Yes, that would be the smart choice, wouldn’t it?” Ragnor sighs. “But I suppose we need someone to make us look good by comparison.”

Elias lobs one of the new knick-knacks at Ragnor’s head, and everyone laughs, and Magnus’s skin feels a little less radioactive.

 

_II. “Let me take care of my friend.”_

 

He isn’t sure if he’s imagining it all.

Ragnor takes up as much space as always, draped across the chair in that way of his, managing to look both regal and lazy. Magnus considers pinching himself, but pours a glass instead.

“Is it really you?” he asks, but Ragnor has always been cryptic, so the response doesn’t prove anything either way. Magnus’s head hurts, more than it has in years.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t go after the boy,” Ragnor says, and Magnus pretends he misunderstands who he means, and Ragnor lets him.

And then Ragnor is gone. He’d thought it was soul-crushing, grieving, and that questioning his sanity—and more importantly, whether there was a reason to hope—was worse. But this, the emptiness, is infinitely harder to deal with, to dampen, to keep from screaming its way out his fingertips—

He almost replaces Ragnor’s armchair, unable to stand seeing it there, having held a ghost, but he grips tightly to his own wrists and puts more green in his home instead. He thinks about Ragnor, giving him advice on his love life from beyond the grave—the grave Magnus sent him to, both with careful, complicated magic over his lifeless body, and by allowing a couple of fucking callous, distracted Shadowhunters to visit to begin with—to usher demons into his best friend’s sanctuary— _and why the fuck were my intentions not pure enough for you_ , he thinks, _I should have asked that when you were here_ , and he’s not sure if he means the figment or when he was really here, but he knows for certain that Ragnor is really not here anymore, won’t be here anymore—

He burns all the black in his apartment in an unnecessary display of destruction. It feels more like a symbol of mourning than the color would’ve been, and he couldn’t stop thinking of Shadowhunters when he saw those clothes, anyway.

His whole home smells like ash. He’ll go shopping tomorrow.

He collapses onto his couch, but then a fresh guilt appears and he stands, then sends Elliot a fire message. He’s relieved when Elliot says he’ll come to the loft; right now, Magnus doesn't want to move.

He was planning to be more hospitable than this, but the second Elliot portals in, Magnus says, “I saw him,” and Elliot sinks into the couch and sobs while Magnus holds him and cries again, quieter.

Elliot doesn’t say anything about the smell or the scorch marks, and Magnus is more grateful than he knows how to express.

Eventually, he manages to fix drinks, and Elliot grips his until his knuckles are white, clinging to it instead of consuming it. Magnus makes frost form on the rim of his whiskey glass and watches it melt, tracing the droplets’ path into the alcohol. He takes a sip; the ice did nothing to water it down.

Elliot’s fingers are so stained with ink that Magnus starts to wonder if his blood is purple. Then he remembers Ragnor’s blood and tilts his drink instead, coaxing an ice cube out of the glass and holding it in his mouth until his teeth ache.

“It’s just like him to pop in and out like that,” Elliot says, hoarse. Magnus nods.

“It really is.”

“It’s been centuries, you bastard, what am I doing still in love with you,” Elliot says to the empty armchair, shoulders trembling. His voice is shaking too much to be bitter. Later, when Elliot is too tired to cry anymore, Magnus offers him the bedroom and a glass of water. Once Elliot has collapsed on top of the covers, Magnus goes back to the couch.

He stays awake all night, coughing until it starts to sound like sobs.

 

III. _There are times we live for somebody else._

 

He’s almost done painstakingly shaping the ink beneath his skin, blue magic slipping into shakiness at his fingertips from exhaustion, when he hears the door open.

“Tattoos are so much more of a Shadowhunter thing,” Catarina says.

“She was supposed to be immortal.”

He doesn’t need to explain that this is his attempt to remedy destiny. To fight fate in an ally and preserve all of the bruises.

“I know,” she says, and squeezes into the armchair with him, in the gap between his ribs and the armrest. He remembers Ragnor and Elliot in this chair, pressed too close together for anyone else in the room’s comfort, and adds a line to the design, swallowing hard.

Catarina keeps her palm pressed to his back while he winces, and when it’s done, he extends his arm, tilting it so she can see the shape below his wrist. It’s four music notes, the first notes of each of their favorite songs; he’d started out looking for a way to preserve Dot, the way she’d been able to smile as they danced even after all she’d been through, but as he’d drawn it, he felt more and more like he had too many people to memorialize and too much blank skin to stop at just one.

The notes dance across his forearm, and it’s fitting, it’s right; it’s the antithesis of Shadowhunters’ runes, drawn to give them some advantage, to help them win. This is a reminder of his loss.

He doesn’t vocalize the sentiment, but he knows Catarina understands it anyway.

He drinks the whiskey directly from the bottle. This is so far past heartache.

 

_IV. I’ll never sink when you are with me._

 

Catarina walks in like a hailstorm.

“Don't make me get a mundane breathalyzer. In fact, I wouldn't even need a mundane, I'm sure Luke would be perfectly willing.”

“Luke has his own shit to deal with,” Magnus says, tipping the glass back. It’s lukewarm now, dull, desensitizing.

“You’re right,” Catarina says, and it’s the closest she’s come to snapping at him in decades. “Which is exactly why he doesn’t need to rescue your ass from impending alcohol poisoning.”

Magnus just shrugs. “I’m pretty sure we’ve long since proven that isn’t a possibility.”

He feels like he does when his magic has been depleted. There’s been too much loss, lately, with no time to inhale in between, to recover.

“Are you sure about this?” Catarina asks abruptly, painfully gentle, with no trace of her previous threatening tone.

“He’s a Shadowhunter,” he says, “My people will be around to suffer from this a lot longer than he will.” _He’s going to die_ , Magnus knows she can hear him avoid saying. “Ragnor made you read those essays by Bentham, too, when we visited him in London that year.”

Catarina sighs and wraps an arm around his shoulders. “You might be a bit of a hedonist, darling, but you were never a utilitarianist.” She squeezes his shoulder. “I know this isn’t what you want, but if it’s what you think is best, I’ll support you."

“However,” she says, smirking a little, “things had better not be quite as bad as you think, politically, because your people are going to have to be fine without you for one night.” He gives her a look, and she rolls her eyes. “I can tell you’re feeling guilty for getting drunk, Magnus. Too late; you’ve already made the decision—which, while not the best one you’ve ever made, is pretty fucking understandable—so the least you can do is get me a glass.”

“You’re the best decision I’ve ever made,” he says, and she rolls her eyes.

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr @basilhallward and @downworldersdeservebetter if you feel like screaming about how every single warlock deserves so much better


End file.
